Why Does Odysseus go to the Underworld?

I have always been a really big fan of Ancient Greek Mythology and all of the stories about the fictional characters behind it. The latest movie regarding this subject, Clash of the Titans, really puts things into perspective and visualizes the different characters and all that they went through in an incredible and thorough way. One of my favorite mythic characters is Odysseus, the Greek King of Ithaca and the hero of the famous book, The Odyssey. He is so important to the entire culture of Greek Mythology and is the source behind one of the biggest questions in all of Mythology as a whole.

Odysseus was on a very long and tumultuous journey to find out why his family had been killed, so he decided to travel to Hades to speak to a man named Teirtimus. Along the way he encountered many important characters in Greek Mythology and eventually made it to the den of the damned. This journey set the standard for all that was to be made important in Mythology and eventually would go on to be the setting of the story the Odyssey.

Odysseus was and will always be one of the more important characters to ever come out of the stories by Homer. All of his adventures have eventually turned out to be the basis of stories that have been recreated and told over and over again by a vast amount of authors and storytellers. If it were not for the adventures of Odysseus, we probably would not have a lot of the epic tales of warriors and heroes that we have been blessed with up until now. His travels to the Underworld is just another example of how amazing Homer was as a writer and a visionary. Nobody else in this lifetime has been able to capture a heroes tale like he has.